NASCAR is headed to Sonoma, California this weekend, where the Xfinity Series will race in the Pit Boss/FoodMaxx 250. Saturday’s competition begins at 4:30 p.m. ET in Sonoma Raceway.

The NASCAR Xfinity Series at the 2025 Sonoma Race will air on The CW, and streams live on DirecTV (free trial).

What: The Pit Boss/FoodMaxx 250, a NASCAR Xfinity Series race

When: Saturday, July 12, 2025

Where: Sonoma Raceway, Sonoma, California

Time: 4:30 p.m. ET

TV: The CW

*It’s important to note that The CW has less reliable coverage on fubo, and new subscribers should check local channel availability.

Here’s a recent NASCAR story via The AP:

CHICAGO (AP) — Shane van Gisbergen burned out his tires in celebration, sending white smoke into the air. He signed a rugby ball and punted it into the stands in downtown Chicago.

It was a familiar scene.

Van Gisbergen completed a Windy City sweep Sunday, winning the NASCAR Cup Series race on the tricky street course in downtown Chicago.

“Epic weekend for us. I’m a lucky guy,” van Gisbergen said.

A talented one, too.

The 36-year-old New Zealand native became the second driver to sweep the Xfinity and Cup races in a single weekend from the pole, joining Kyle Busch at Indianapolis in 2016. With his third career Cup win, he also became the winningest foreign-born driver on NASCAR’s top series.

It was van Gisbergen’s second victory of the season after the Trackhouse Racing driver also won last month on a Mexico City road course.

“He’s the best road course stock car racer that I’ve ever seen,” Trackhouse owner Justin Marks said. “I think when he’s done with us all and walks away from the sport, I think he’s going to walk away as the best road course racer that this sport has ever seen.”

Marks brought van Gisbergen over from Australia’s Supercars for the first edition of NASCAR’s Chicago experiment in 2023, and he became the first driver to win his Cup debut since Johnny Rutherford in the second qualifying race at Daytona in 1963.

He also won Chicago’s Xfinity Series stop last year and the first stage in the Cup race before he was knocked out by a crash.

“This joint, it’s changed my life,” van Gisbergen said. “I didn’t have any plans to do more NASCAR races when I first came over here, and I never thought I’d be in NASCAR full time.”

In what might be the last NASCAR race on the downtown Chicago circuit, Ty Gibbs was second and Tyler Reddick finished third. Denny Hamlin and Kyle Busch rounded out the top five.

“My team called a great strategy and got me in position to get me up front to compete for the win,” Gibbs said. “It worked out for us today, so I’m glad to have a good finish, but we wish we could have gone for the win.”

Michael McDowell joined van Gisbergen on the front row and quickly moved in front. He won Stage 1 and led for 31 laps before he was derailed by a throttle cable issue.

Van Gisbergen regained the lead when he passed Chase Briscoe with 16 laps left. As fog and rain moved into downtown Chicago, van Gisbergen controlled the action the rest of the way.

AJ Allmendinger was sixth, and Ryan Preece finished seventh. Ryan Blaney, who won the second stage, was 12th.

“I thought overall it was a pretty decent day. It was nice to win that stage,” Blaney said.

William Byron’s day was cut short by a clutch problem. The Hendrick Motorsports driver leads the point standings by 13 points over Chase Elliott.

After McDowell seized the lead early in the race, Carson Hocevar caused a multicar crash when he hit the wall and spun out between Turns 10 and 11. Brad Keselowski, Austin Dillon, Daniel Suárez and Will Brown were among the drivers collected in the wreck.

“I didn’t see it until the last second,” Keselowski said. “I slowed down and I actually felt I was going to get stopped and then I just kind of got ran over from behind. It’s just a narrow street course and sometimes there’s nowhere to go.”

Ty Dillon and Reddick moved into the third round of NASCAR’s inaugural in-season tournament when Keselowski and Hocevar were unable to finish the race. Dillon, the No. 32 seed, eliminated Keselowski after he upset top-seeded Denny Hamlin last weekend at Atlanta.

Gibbs, Preece, Alex Bowman, John H. Nemechek, Zane Smith and Erik Jones also advanced. The winner of the five-race, bracket-style tournament takes home a $1 million prize.

Bowman, the 2024 champion on the downtown street course, won his head-to-head matchup with Bubba Wallace. Bowman and Wallace made contact as they battled for position late in the race after they also tangled in Chicago last year.

“I wasn’t expecting that to happen or to get raced like that, but we did,” Bowman said. “We just have to move on from it and keep digging. I don’t really know what I could have done much different.”

Top-20 finish

Katherine Legge finished 19th for her best career Cup result. She became the first woman to finish in the top 20 in a Cup race since Danica Patrick at Texas in November 2017.

Legge was the first woman to qualify for the Cup race in downtown Chicago.

Up next

The Cup Series is at Sonoma Raceway in California on Sunday, July 13.

For the third time in the last month, the NASCAR Cup Series is set to run a non-oval race, with this weekend’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 scheduled to take place at Sonoma Raceway.

The Cup Series uses the 12-turn, 1.99-mile (3.203-kilometer) Sonoma, California road course layout, and Sunday afternoon’s race, the third road course race and fourth non-oval race of the 2025 season, is set to be a 110-lap race.

The qualifying format used for road and street course races is fairly straightforward, though it does differ from what Sonoma has seen in previous years.

Drivers are split up into two groups based on the qualifying metric. The current formula is a two-variable formula which replaced the old four-variable formula after the 2024 season. A full breakdown of that metric can be found here.

Drivers with the higher (worse) scores run in the first group, and drivers with the lower (better) scores run in the second. Results of both groups are simply combined to determine the full 37-car starting lineup. There is no longer a second round, and there are no row-by-row designations based on which group a driver is in.

Follow along with our live qualifying updates from Sonoma Raceway.

NASCAR at Sonoma: Full starting lineup

1st – Shane van Gisbergen, No. 88 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet

2nd – Chase Briscoe, No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

3rd – William Byron, No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

4th – Ross Chastain, No. 1 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet

5th – A.J. Allmendinger, No. 16 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet

6th – Ty Gibbs, No. 54 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

7th – Ryan Blaney, No. 12 Team Penske Ford

8th – Tyler Reddick, No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota

9th – Alex Bowman, No. 48 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

10th – Christopher Bell, No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

11th – Kyle Larson, No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

12th – Zane Smith, No. 38 Front Row Motorsports Ford

13th – Chase Elliott, No. 9 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet

14th – Chris Buescher, No. 17 RFK Racing Ford

15th – Michael McDowell, No. 71 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet

16th – Denny Hamlin, No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota

17th – Kyle Busch, No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet

18th – John Hunter Nemechek, No. 42 Legacy Motor Club Toyota

19th – Daniel Suarez, No. 99 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet

20th – Ryan Preece, No. 60 RFK Racing Ford

21st – Brad Keselowski, No. 6 RFK Racing Ford

22nd – Joey Logano, No. 22 Team Penske Ford

23rd – Carson Hocevar, No. 77 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet

24th – Austin Cindric, No. 2 Team Penske Ford

25th – Josh Berry, No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing Ford

26th – Ty Dillon, No. 10 Kaulig Racing Chevrolet

27th – Cole Custer, No. 41 Haas Factory Team Ford

28th – Riley Herbst, No. 35 23XI Racing Toyota

29th – Justin Haley, No. 7 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet

30th – Bubba Wallace, No. 23 23XI Racing Toyota

31st – Erik Jones, No. 43 Legacy Motor Club Toyota

32nd – Noah Gragson, No. 4 Front Row Motorsports Ford

33rd – Austin Dillon, No. 3 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet

34th – Ricky Stenhouse Jr., No. 47 Hyak Motorsports Chevrolet

35th – Todd Gilliland, No. 34 Front Row Motorsports Ford

36th – Cody Ware, No. 51 Rick Ware Racing Ford

37th – Katherine Legge, No. 78 Live Fast Motorsports Chevrolet

Shane van Gisbergen proved in his NASCAR debut to be an elite road and street course racer by winning in his first career outing.

Two years later, his rivals have gotten a good look at the New Zealander’s technique and have declared him the favorite to win Sunday at Sonoma Raceway. He will start from the pole for the second consecutive week and third time in five races.

“It’s pretty awesome, we’ve had a really cool couple of weeks,” said the Trackhouse Racing driver. “It’s so cool how stoked everyone is and you feel the energy in the shop when you walk in. It’s just a cool atmosphere in the shop, everyone is lifted up.”

Van Gisbergen is on a two-race winning streak on the specialty courses following victories on the road course in Mexico City (where he won by 16.6 seconds from the pole) and last Sunday on the streets of Chicago (again from the pole). He has five consecutive finishes of seventh or higher dating back to Watkins Glen International last September.

“He’s so good and it’s rare that you see somebody stand out like that and distance himself from the competition,” said Kyle Larson, last year’s winner at Sonoma. “He’s way, way, way better than us at the road course stuff.”

The secret, his rivals have learned, is a toe-heel braking technique that none of them can master.

“If I tried to learn what he’s doing, it would take me until I retire,” Kyle Busch said.

Added Larson: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. There’s zero chance I can learn how to do that.”

Van Gisbergen, who won at Sonoma in his Xfinity Series debut last year and started from the pole Saturday in that race, will be making his Cup debut Sunday on the picturesque track in Northern California’s wine country.

He is beatable, said Denny Hamlin, but it won’t be easy for any driver to stop van Gisbergen’s dominance.

“I think you are going to need things to not go his way, and then someone is going to have to really hit it,” Hamlin said. “That, to me, is probably going to be challenging. Cautions could turn things upside down. He is beatable, on speed alone, but I would say outright pace? No.”

In addition to the way van Gisbergen brakes, Hamlin commended the way the Kiwi approaches the courses.

“His approach to how he attacks certain corners seems to be the thing where we’re more reactive,” Hamlin said. “I’m more reactive to seeing how someone approaches a corner to go fast. He’s proactive and knows how to approach it, so he’s better and faster before I am. And by the time I start to get closer, he then refines his technique and goes even faster.”

Joey Logano had little to offer on his current feud with Ross Chastain. It heated up last week at Chicago when Chastain spun Logano in a retaliatory move that sent Logano to NASCAR to demand punishment for a deliberate action.

NASCAR did not penalize Chastain and the two drivers have not spoken since Sunday’s postrace confrontation.

“We haven’t talked,” Logano said Saturday. “It is what it is.”

Logano didn’t want to talk about Chastain, anyway.

“He made his choices. I’m just going to go race my car,” Logano said.

As for Chastain? He maintained that “there’s three sides to every story.”

“I think that a lot of people were all running into each other for the last couple of laps,” Chastain said. “That’s what I saw.”

Bubba Wallace tried to fix his frayed relationship with Alex Bowman as soon as they arrived in California earlier this week.

The two had an incident at Chicago for the second consecutive year and have had other run-ins in the past. After the latest dustup, Bowman expressed surprise that the two were still having issues.

“I thought we had squashed our beef, but clearly we have not,” Bowman said in Chicago.

To prove to Bowman that they had indeed moved on, Wallace said he saw Bowman in a Napa Valley restaurant, approached him from behind and wrapped him in a bear hug. He later paid for Bowman’s dinner.

“I told him I messed up like an idiot,” Wallace said of his driving at Chicago. “I apologized. I was down for a couple days about it. So I bought him a meal. It felt right.”

For the second consecutive weekend, Shane van Gisbergen has pulled off an impressive feat.

The driver of the No. 88 Red Bull Chevrolet for Trackhouse Racing put down a dominant lap in qualifying (74.594s/96.040mph) to collect the pole position for Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway — his second pole position of the weekend at the 1.99-mile road course in Sonoma, California.

During last weekend’s annual trip to the Chicago Street Course, the Auckland, New Zealand-native made himself a piece of history, becoming the second driver to win from the pole in the NASCAR Cup and Xfinity Series on the same weekend. Having racked up the pole for both events this weekend, it’s a mark he’ll look to duplicate at Sonoma.

The mind-blowing lap time, which had van Gisbergen sitting a quarter-second faster than any other driver, went straight to the top of the speed charts at the start of the second 20-minute group. However, with only a slim margin, the New Zealander went back on the racetrack hoping to retain the pole.

STARTING LINEUP: 2025 NCS Toyota / Save Mart 350

“I’m shaking. That was pretty full-on. I’m stoked to have RedBull on the car. Thank you to Trackhouse and Chevy, amazing car,” said van Gisbergen. “We weren’t very good in practice, but new tires fixed it. Hopefully, we can be good for the race. But what a cool day.”

There wasn’t a single driver who returned to the racetrack that even came close to the lap of the Trackhouse Racing driver, but that didn’t stop him from schooling the remainder of the field.

Chase Briscoe, who challenged Shane van Gisbergen for the pole last weekend at the Chicago Street Course, was the second-fastest driver in qualifying on Saturday. Briscoe and van Gisbergen have combined to win the pole position in six of the last eight NASCAR Cup Series events.

William Byron was the quickest of those in the first group of qualifying, but had to settle for a third-place starting spot. Ross Chastain posted the fourth-fastest lap, and AJ Allmendinger (the fastest car in practice) rounded out the top five.

Ty Gibbs was sixth fastest in qualifying, with Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Alex Bowman, and Christopher Bell rounding out the top-10.

In 12th-place, Zane Smith put together a strong qualifying result for his Front Row Motorsports team.

Other notables include Chase Elliott (13th), Chris Buescher (14th), Denny Hamlin (16th), Joey Logano (22nd), and Austin Cindric (24th).

Katherine Legge, after an incredible effort to get into the Chicago Street Race last weekend, suffered mechanical issues with her Live Fast Motorsports Chevrolet in practice and thus did not make a qualifying run.

The Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway will take place on Sunday, July 12 at 3:30 pm ET on TNT Sports, Performance Racing Network, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90.

Shane van Gisbergen has now won four consecutive poles in the NASCAR Cup and Xfinity Series, sweeping qualifying at both Chicago and now Sonoma. In Cup qualifying at Sonoma on Saturday, he looked untouchable, earning his fourth career pole and third of the 2025 season.

“I’m shaking,” said van Gisbergen after the pole run. “That was pretty full-on. I’m stoked to have Red Bull on the car. Thank you to Trackhouse and Chevy — amazing car. We weren’t very good in practice. New tires fixed it. So yeah, hopefully we can be good in the race. What a good day.”

As for what he needs in order to capture the checkered flag on Sunday, SVG said he needs “a bit more rear grip and a bit better balance … just tune it up a little bit, but obviously not a bad spot to start.”

He will be joined on the front row by Chase Briscoe, who ended the session 0.250s off the pole lap by the driver of the No. 88 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet. William Byron was third, Ross Chastain fourth, and A.J. Allmendinger fifth.

Ty Gibbs, Ryan Blaney, Tyler Reddick, Alex Bowman, and Christopher Bell filled out the remainder of the top ten.

This is also the first pole position for a Cup car with Red Bull as the primary sponsor since Kasey Kahne’s pole position at Atlanta in September of 2011.

Watch: SVG ‘shaken’ to capture back-to-back Cup Series pole awards

The qualifying session went on without any major incidents, but there were a few off-track excursions and a spin by Blaney.

Byron set the pace in Group A with a 1:15.025s, and while it was an impressive lap, it wasn’t enough to hang on for pole as Byron looks to rebound after a difficult month.

SVG went to the top of the board early in Group B, lapping the road course in 1:14.833s. However, other drivers still had a chance as Briscoe was only 0.011s off the pole time.

However, the three-time Supercars champ crushed any hope remaining on his second run, picking it up to a 1:14.594s as most of the frontrunners failed to improve at all.

Katherine Legge was the only driver who did not set a qualifying time, so she will start 37th in Sunday’s race.